Pages 38–39
One paragraph, one page, no date, no year header: in eighth grade, a boy named Bruce Green falls "dreadfully in love" with a classmate named Mildred Bonk. Both are brand new, and nothing ties them to anyone you've met — which is now officially the book's method: Erdedy, the attaché, Clenette, and now Green have each arrived as total strangers, scene after scene. You are not behind; being dropped among strangers is the design. The register here is the thing to hear — junior-high worship written in deliberately overwrought romantic prose that is winking and meaning it at the same time.
Terms, in order of appearance
- nocturnal emitter (p. 39) — a boy who has wet dreams; i.e., every boy in those corridors.
- flaxen (p. 39) — pale gold, like flax fiber; quoted in the text from "an overwrought teacher."
- Keds (p. 39) — real brand of canvas sneakers; hers are orange with purple-glitter laces.
- anfractuous (p. 39) — real, rare: full of windings and turnings. "Pelvically anfractuous" is this book's own construction.
After you read: three things
1. The voice is doubled, and you don't have to pick a side. The diction is extravagant — "the fickle angel of puberty," a "wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors" (p. 39) — and it openly flags its own secondhand quality (even "flaxen" is somebody else's word, credited to a teacher). Yet the feeling underneath is meant. Parody and sincerity are running simultaneously; the paragraph works only if you let both stand.
2. The name is the argument. The whole set-piece turns on the claim that "Mildred Bonk" is the wrong name for a girl who looks like "a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone" (p. 38) — and then it ends by pronouncing the plain name in full, like a verdict: "A vision in a sundress and silly shoes. Mildred L. Bonk." (p. 39). A page-long tug-of-war between how someone looks and what they're actually called.
3. One subordinate clause carries all the real information. Mid-rhapsody: the angel of puberty is "the same angel who didn’t even seem to know Bruce Green’s zip code" (p. 39). That's the entire portrait of Green himself — late-blooming, invisible, loving from the far end of the food chain — smuggled into a sentence that's officially about her. The scene is about him; it just never faces him directly.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.